5 super foods for better play

Bananas, Sweet Potatoes, Nuts, Green Tea, and Salmon.

Aside from cutting back on sodium, go with a potassium-infused food like bananas. Potassium is a super-duper nutrient in that it’ll flush away that pesky water and salt from your body, leaving you looking slim.

This isn’t just a concern for diabetics. Foods with lower GI values (around 55 or lower) are digested more slowly, lowering insulin resistance and helping to stop calorie conversion into fat. When you boil sweet potatoes (as opposed to baking, etc.), they hold a low GI score somewhere in the 40s. Plus, sweet potatoes come stocked with awesome vitamins, including B6, C and A.

Nuts offer healthy fat (yes, there is such a thing) that can nourish your body while simultaneously switching off fat genes. The good, high fat content in nuts (walnuts, almonds, etc.) will also help keep you from feeling famished in-between meals, ensuring you don’t make a spur-of-the-moment pit stop at Carl’s Jr. for some monstrosity of a burger that leaves you depressed and feeling like a fat ass five minutes after consumption.

Okay, ya drink it, ya don’t eat it, but the catechins in green tea are antioxidants that trigger fat release from fat cells. It particularly targets your tum tum, too. After release, it even encourages the liver to burn that fat and use it as energy. In other words, if you don’t like hot tea, you dang well better start if you wanna look good in your suit and shades any time soon.

Lean protein is important. After you workout, you need to feed your hungry muscles if you want to develop a more toned (or even ripped!) body. Salmon is a lean meat that is both high in protein and way up there in omega-3s, which serve to ax fat build-up and fight inflammation, respectively.